Long before New Mexico was a playground for the rich and famous, it was a playground for my family.

My Daddy’s family hailed from there, going back to before statehood, when it was a dangerous and unsettled wilderness. Edward Arlington Robinson’s line “We count our past backwards by the gravestones and the apple trees” fits my feelings about New Mexico perfectly. All I have to do is change “apple trees” to cacti.

My Daddy’s family liked to go camping, again long before camping was an in thing to do. It was a time when the mountain roads were not paved and the winter air was so pure and cold you could see all the way to tomorrow.

The whole bunch of us — grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins — went on one of these camping trips when I was a toddler. I have no memory of this event, but I’ve been told they cooked breakfast. I have experienced a lot of these campfire breakfasts, eating scrambled eggs, hash browns and bacon, all cooked over a propane stove. The taste of food like that, when you’re shaking with the bone-numbing morning cold and your family is all about you, surpasses any other gastronomic delight I have ever experienced.

Even though I have no memory of what happened that day, I’ve heard about it often enough to feel as if I remember it. Right in the middle of the cooking and laughing and sleepy-morning good times, I picked up a handful of gravel and tossed it onto the cooking eggs.

Fortunately for me, my family wasn’t prone to spank children. The adult consensus was that I had gotten tired of not being the center of attention and made a move to focus attention on myself. So, they picked me up and laughed about it, tossed the eggs and had a breakfast of hash browns and bacon, instead.

That was also the camping trip in which my cousin, who was six months older than me, fell into the ice-encrusted mountain stream and had to be rescued and cuddled for warmth. There was evidently a lot of baby cuddling and laughter on that trip and it was the beginning of glorious memories of the mountains before they were trendy for both my cousin and I.

I’m telling you this story, not to confirm your suspicions that I was an indulged and adored child (I was) but to point out that two-year-olds behave a certain way, and when they behave that way, it’s ok … for two-year-olds. Anyone with half a brain knows that baby people act out the primitive cravings for attention that never leave any of us in primitive, baby people, ways.

Anyone with half a brain also knows that certain maladjusted people, who maybe didn’t get their fair share of cuddling and adoration when they were babies, don’t grow out of this. Back before the internet, these jerks (there is no better word) visited their boorish behavior on those long suffering souls who had to work with them or have them over for Thanksgiving dinner. In short, the same families who’d messed them up in the first place had to pay the price of putting up with them for life.

But family fracturing and social isolation has deprived these folks of their traditional outlet. At the same time, the internet has given them another one. Far from being isolated on line, they’ve formed themselves into virtual clubs for the socially inept. They hang self-congratulatory monikers on themselves and spend a lot of time telling each other how special they are and how totally second-rate the rest of the world is.

But this constant verbal back-slapping and repetitive proclaiming of their own superiority to one another doesn’t give them enough attention from the larger world. Staying in their own little clubhouse and high-fiving one another until their palms bleed doesn’t — nothing can — satisfy their hunger for attention. They need more.

They sally forth from their little enclaves to toss verbal sand into everyone else’s eggs. Then they go hopping home to brag about their exploits.

One of their members recently wrote an accidental confession of sorts, based on his astounding discovery that you can’t get people to dine with you if you throw sand in their eggs. What worked for me when I was two, just doesn’t get the same loving tolerance from people who aren’t your adoring family and who are operating under the (evidently inaccurate) assumption that you are an adult.

This little essay, titled “Why I’m quitting the online atheism community,” is one atheist’s discussion about how he has learned that he can’t “convert” those “morons” who believe in God to his way of thinking by dashing onto our blogs and inserting himself into our conversations and calling us, well, morons.

I don’t know exactly what led this young man to this flash of astounding social enlightenment, but, to be honest, I am more than a little amused by his belief that he’s had some sort of interpersonal epiphany. I keep wanting to ask: Who raised you fella?

This atheist’s essay interested me for a couple of reasons, other than the fact that it’s accidentally funny.

First, it is a frank admission of what I think most of us already know. These clumsy trolls are trying to convert us to their way of thinking.

Second, these clumsy trolls actually think that their insults and tiresome verbal wanderings are some sort of discussion rather than an affliction and an intrusion.

I imagine that the idiotic billboards they hang up at Christmas fall into the same kind of activity. They think billboards with insults on them are saying something to people of faith. For our part, all we see are a bunch of adult two-year-olds, running around, pulling their pants down and tossing sand in our eggs.

When they cross the line from insults and adolescent grandiosity into coercion and discrimination, the laugh track dies. But that is a discussion for another post. Right now, I’ll confine myself to the question of questionable behavior by those who are so lacking in social grace that they think yelling insults and annoying people will appeal to and “convert” them.

The moral of this story is that if you want to convert people, don’t throw dirt, including verbal dirt, in their eggs. It applies to rude Christians as well as atheist trolls.

If you didn’t get your loving as a child and feel an aching need for it that won’t fill, turn to Jesus. His love is the love you were made for. Everything else is a faint copy.

The Cheyennes and other plains tribes had a practice called counting coup.

Counting coup, Cheyenne style, meant taking a life-threatening risk to dash up to a bear or a rival tribe member and touch them, then dash back to your fellows to get well-earned kudos for your bravery. The essential component to counting coup, Cheyenne style, was that it took actual guts to do it.

I never understood this before I began blogging, but evidently counting coup has moved forward into the tribal rites of various on-line social clubs. At least on this blog, atheist trolls are the ones who seem to practice it.

For reasons I don’t fully get, the atheist bloggers on Patheos have zeroed Public Catholic in general and little ole me in particular, for their disdain. According to them, we’re all crazy over here on the Catholic portal and need a good dressing down from time to time.

I come in for more than my share of this rhubarb. It’s the usual stuff about how I’m a politician who’s writing all this religious stuff for political gain and I’m a religious fanatic with an IQ about three points above asphalt. That sort of thing.

What interests me are the coup-counters. They come dashing in here and drop off a random insult in what is usually a totally non sequitur fashion and then dash back to the Spanky and Our Gang Christian-Haters Clubhouse to tell the tale of their courage.

The Cheyennes risked their lives when they counted coup. It took both intelligence and actual courage for them to do it. Since almost all these insult-dropping dive-bombers from the atheist zone arrive under cover of pseudonym, they aren’t even risking their reputations. It also doesn’t take a whole boatload of intelligence to type some version of “sez you, you piece of dirt” and then go running off.

It’s kind of fun to watch this spectacle. And when its not kind of fun, I just delete.

It is interesting though, how people who say they don’t believe in God also can’t say it enough times to feel good about themselves. They really do protest too much. When tasked on this point, they usually come up with an explanation about how they aren’t obsessed with God. It’s just us Christians who force them to behave as if they were obsessed with God because they can’t, well, live in a world where people believe things that they don’t believe.

Oh well.

I pray for them. And I want them to know that God loves them as much as He loves any of His children. Anytime they decide to stop running around waving their arms and pulling their pants down, they are always welcome at His table. They are my lost and somewhat ditzy brothers.

In the meantime, I get a kind of there-they-go-again amusement from their coup-counting. As for the insults, I’m still waiting for them to come up with one I haven’t already heard a few thousand times before.

How do we respond to people who follow Dr Dawkins’ advice to mock and ridicule us with contempt and in public?

One reaction is to try to reason with the mockers and ridiculers.

Another would be to mock and ridicule back.

A third might be to invite them to, as we say here in Oklahoma, “take it outside.”

The problem with all these responses is that people who deliberately and with malice of forethought single out a group of people for public mockery and ridicule have, by their actions, placed themselves beyond the pale of civil society. Their behavior is reprehensible. So long as they continue to engage in it, they do not deserve the courtesy of either replies or engagement of any sort.

I posted Dawkins: Mock Them. Ridicule Them. In Public. With Contempt with the expectation that I would get a flurry of idiotic comments from atheist provocateurs, trying to engage the readers of this blog in verbal mud wrestling. I was not disappointed. I deleted all but two of these which I let through because they were the least offensive. I wanted to make them available as an educational exercise for the Christians who read Public Catholic.

I think we need to become aware of this asinine behavior and decide how to handle it.

Two of Public Catholic’s regular readers tried to answer these comments. One reader went the way of giving the commenter the benefit of the doubt and trying to answer it intelligently. The other reader replied with anger.

Neither response was wrong.

But it is interesting that one of the atheist provocateurs immediately pounced on the angry response with an ad hominem attack on Catholics. It was actually a comic pose for this individual to take, considering the spate of claptrap — all insulting — he had tried to post on this blog. It is also interesting that he did not want to answer the more measured reply. He went instead for the response he had been trying to provoke, which was anger.

Now, I’m sure he’ll re-tell this tale of his daring assault on the Catholics — with himself as the hero — to his fellow atheist provocateurs.

Do I hear the word “childish?” How about the phrase “grade school?”

They both fit.

And that is the point.

It doesn’t make any difference what you say to people like this. Anger is as good as reason. They aren’t trying to engage in legitimate discussion. They are trying to provoke, so they can count coup when they get back to their den.

This is what their leader, Dr Dawkins, has taught them to do.

The entire edifice of their tawdry behavior is based on a pretense they pretend that they are intellectually superior. This pose is something that Dr Dawkins and many of the other “new atheists” have used to peddle their worn-out arguments to impressionable and desperately insecure people who want above all things to be different, special and superior. They tell these people that all they have to do to prove their intelligence is take a pose of unbelief and behave like a pack of hounds on the verbal attack.

Of course, anyone who buys this pandering sell-job is unlikely to be all that canny. But that’s another issue for another post.

The reason they come over here and behave like trolls is that this behavior gives them something to brag about later.

Not all atheists behave like this. But there are enough of them who do to make life miserable for everybody else.

Unfortunately, not every obnoxious atheist you will meet in your life is going to fall into the braggadocio category. Some of them are genuinely hate-filled jerks who get a kick out of hurting other people. Our society has decided that race baiting and gay baiting are no longer acceptable sports. It has replaced it with Christian-baiting. Especially in our institutions of higher learning and in certain parts of the country, it is socially acceptable to publicly mock, ridicule and treat Christians with contempt. It is certainly acceptable to do so in our movies and on made for cable television.

So what’s a Christian to do?

Let’s focus today on the online atheist trolls who come onto blogs and take over the discussion. These fall into two types. The first just argues in an endless circle. They can go all day and never say one original thing, and they are unashamed to repeat themselves over and over. They never stop making their argumentative comments. These people seem to have a goal of taking over other people’s conversations and focusing them on themselves and their agendas.

You’ll notice that I made a statement in the blog rules here that I don’t allow people to take over this blog with their agendas. That statement is there for people like this.

This isn’t discussion. It’s bullying.

I’ve seen it at public meetings when a group comes in and begins yelling and taking over the mike. They can effectively end all discourse and shut down the meeting. This is not free speech. It is something quite the opposite of free speech, since it has the effect of keeping others from joining into discussion. It also serves the purpose of ending public meetings. I’ve seen many groups just decide to end public discussion because they could not handle the disruptive bullies who show up.

In an online forum like this one, their behavior is easy to stop, if the person who’s running the blog has the will. All I have to do to shut them down and allow others to speak is delete their blasts of 20 hateful comments, or, as I often do, allow the most thoughtful of their blast of twenty comments through and delete the rest. If I didn’t, the nice people who enjoy this blog would end up leaving and all I would have left would be the trashy trolls and their hate-filled, bullying agenda.

Another tactic I’ve seen is to make comments like the two that I let through on the Dawkins post. These aren’t anything even vaguely resembling an attempt at discussion. They are nonsensical little barbs designed to provoke. I would guess that what they are hoping to provoke is something they can use to brag about later.

I think these kinds of comments come from the lower end of the atheist spectrum; the mentally — if not chronologically — adolescent members of the atheist group who are total and absolute followers of their leadership. These is a certain swagger to their behavior, but certainly nothing that is recognizable as intellectual gravitas.

I almost never let these kinds of things through to the Public Catholic board. When I do, it’s always for illustrative purposes.

There is a lot of this tripe out there in the blogosphere, so what’s a Christian to do when he or she encounters it?

My feeling is that if a blog is run for the entertainment of this type of person and they tend to dominate the discussion, your peace of mind requires that you shun that blog. Why go through trying to talk to people who have such aggressively closed minds? They need prayer more than they need argument.

It’s all right to practice on the few of these that I let through on Public Catholic. That’s usually why I let them through. So you can have a go at them and learn from the experience.

One thing I have observed: Nothing makes atheist trolls more upset than being ignored. When I delete them, they respond with snotty comments directed at me personally. These can get quite ugly, but they don’t bother me. Rather, they confirm my original decision to delete their earlier comments. I didn’t create this blog to provide a forum for atheists. That’s not its purpose. I also didn’t create it to attract as much traffic of any sort that I could get.

Public Catholic is here to help Christians stand for Jesus in a post-Christian world. I range all over the map with the topics I cover, but all of them are in some way connected (at least in my mind) with that one goal. One of the most important facets of standing for Jesus in a post Christian world is learning the mental trick of standing a bit apart from that world and thinking things through for yourself. You cannot follow Christ and be swept up by the gods of this world, or their many memes.

Every so often I put up a post dealing with the new atheism and its vitriol. I never do this to annoy the new atheists. I always do it to help you learn how to deal with them.

We’ll talk later about the much more serious attacks that come against Christians in our real lives. For now, let’s try to discern how to handle the internet atheist trolls.

If you have a blog of your own, how do you handle them there?

Do any of them manage to shake your faith?

Do they make you want to hide your faith when you go online to avoid attack?

Do they overwhelm you?

Can you answer them, or do you just want to leave the premises when they start their stuff?

These are all questions we need to explore. They are part of what it means to be a Christian today.

Representative Rebecca Hamilton, 18-year member of the Oklahoma House of Representatives talks about life as a Public Catholic. Read her Bio Here

Blog Rules

I want Public Catholic to be a welcoming place. As my mother would say, be polite. What that means is use courtesy and civility. It also means do not attempt to hijack the board with your personal agendas. Public Catholic is a Catholic, Christian blog. I created it to empower Christians to stand for Jesus in today's world. Repetitive, harassing attacks against the faith, Jesus or the Church are not welcome here. Address others with respect and refer to public figures in the same way. No name calling. No cursing. No hitting. No spitting.